Integration of Persistent Integration of Persistent Identifiers: Identifiers:

a University Perspectivea University PerspectiveJohn Vaughn

Executive Vice PresidentAssociation of American Universities

AAU Organization and OperationAAU Organization and Operation• Founded in 1900 by 14 universities that offered

the PhD

• Initial purpose: improve, standardize PhD education

• Current Membership: 60 US, 2 Canadian universities – 36 public, 26 private

AAU Organization and OperationAAU Organization and Operation• Member presidents meet twice a year; also

convene:

– chief academic officers– senior research officers– graduate deans– government relations officers– public affairs officers

AAU MissionAAU Mission

• Develop and implement national policies supporting research and scholarship, graduate and undergraduate education

• Provide forum for discussion of institutional policies that strengthen the association’s member institutions

• 58% of all federal research funds to colleges and universities

• 15% of bachelor’s degrees, 45% of research doctorate degrees, 65% of postdoctoral positions

• 75% of members of the National Academy of Sciences

• From 2007-2011: 1.13 million publications, 67% of US total, 19% of world total 10.6 million citations, 89% of US total, 35% of world total

AAU UniversitiesAAU Universities’’ Impact on Research and Education Impact on Research and Education

• Mid-1980s – AAU/ARL Research Libraries project: acquisition and distribution of foreign language and area studies

materials intellectual property rights in the digital environment a national strategy for managing scientific and technological

information

• 1999 -- Intellectual Property and New Media Technologies: A Framework for Policy Development at AAU Institutions

• 2000 – Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Communication

AAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication IssuesAAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication Issues

• 2002 – AAU/ARL/APS – New Economic Model for Scholarly Publishing

• 2009 – Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

• Current: OSTP Public Access Memorandum SHARE – an ARL/AAU/APLU initiative

AAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication IssuesAAU Engagement in Scholarly Communication Issues

• Cross-institutional network of digital repositories

• Ensure access to, preservation and reuse of results of federally funded research

• Enable university researchers to submit research articles to federal agency-designated repositories using a single, common user interface, with SHARE packaging and delivering relevant metadata, files, and links

• Ensure compliance with agency requirements

SHared Access to Research Ecosystem -- SHARESHared Access to Research Ecosystem -- SHARE

• Knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation a core mission of universities

• University interest in collecting and preserving their scholarly output to assure access, and also for internal operational and analytic purposes

• Making research articles, data and their associated metadata publicly accessible for reuse, text mining, data mining and machine reading will enhance and accelerate the creation and discovery of new knowledge

Why Are Universities Building SHARE?Why Are Universities Building SHARE?

• A national, federated system of interoperable repositories will need a registry of researcher identifiers like ORCID

• Science and scholarship global: SHARE must interconnect with similar repositories in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere; ORCID’s international scope critical

SHARE and ORCIDSHARE and ORCID

• US research universities and their faculty increasingly collaborate with universities in other countries: 1960s – 86% of APS journal authors US; last 10 years – 37%

• AAU/ARU research and education collaboration

• Hefei Statement on characteristics of research universities: AAU, LERU, Go8, C9

• Global Research Council: Beijing, May, 2014: public access, research careers

International Research CollaborationsInternational Research Collaborations

• Reduce administrative burden on faculty and staff by auto-populating grant biosketches and other required reporting forms

• Facilitate better management of research on campus

• Support more effective tracking of outcomes from researchers at all levels (grad students, postdocs, faculty)

• Better describe multi-sector collaborations and round out the picture of local and regional economic impact

University Benefits of Persistent Researcher IdentifiersUniversity Benefits of Persistent Researcher Identifiers

• Allow a better understanding of workforce dynamics (within and across regions, disciplines, and types of institutions)

• Assist in advocacy efforts by providing more data about collaboration and flows of researchers across institutions and sectors

• Assist in advocacy by allowing data and anecdotes to be more easily united to explain the value of university research to policymakers and other external audiences

Benefits to University AssociationsBenefits to University Associations

Researchers must see the benefit of a researcher ID to provide the incentive to participate

Concern that while persistent identifiers may make certain kinds of activities easier, may also lead to new reporting requirements

ORCID identifiers could facilitate a mechanistic evaluation of research productivity –

and encourage differential impacts across disciplines:physical, life sciences vs social sciences and humanities

Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers

• Decentralization – campuses and units within them use different systems and have different organizations

• Complex hierarchy of researchers at large institutions (PIs, postdocs, research staff), some of whom may move frequently among institutions

• Institutions could be the place where researchers first “enter the system” (i.e., grad students publishing their first paper) so may need special rules for that

• Disciplinary societies, not institutions, set many of the norms for researchers

Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers Challenges for University Integration of Persistent Identifiers

• Incentives targeted to several levels: administrators and faculty both need to understand the benefits of ORCID and how it fits into the myriad related initiatives of government agencies, publishers, universities, societies, and more

• A brief FAQ, written in plain language, that addresses key issues, including privacy, could help

• The Sloan-funded adoption and integration grants recently awarded by ORCID can serve as case studies to provide examples for other institutions

Actions to Facilitate Adoption by Universities and Their FacultiesActions to Facilitate Adoption by Universities and Their Faculties